journal Archive

I have a headache and hate everything this morning. (Yes, I know what time it is, but I also know when I woke up.) In the words of the great philosopher, coffee had better be the answer. Heading to favorite watering hole shortly.

Happy 4th of July

by Amelia G : July 4th, 2008

In the early days of American history, the founding fathers were a little fuzzy about which day of the first week in July they wanted to celebrate American independence. In 1778, General George Washington, who became the first president of the United States in 1789, saw to it that his soldiers got double rations of rum for the event. In 1776, John Adams, who became the second president of the United States in 1797, and was recently commemorated in a decent HBO miniseries, said the occasion “ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations.” Over time, the holiday has been more or less formalized and somewhat regional. Parts of the American South refused to celebrate July 4th for some time because they were pissy about losing the Civil War. Well, in a way, everyone loses a civil war, but, in this instance, I mean lost in the battle-followed-by-formally-admitting-defeat way and not in the personal and societal loss way. It was actually not until 1941 that Independence Day was formalized as a paid federal holiday on the 4th of July and celebrated all through these 50 states.

Even when I worked on government gigs, back when I lived in the Washington, DC area, I was always a contractor and I don’t think I have ever gotten a paid holiday from any job I have ever held. Apparently, being my own boss is no improvement, as I’m making myself work today. At some point this evening, I’m going to go up on my roof with some family and friends though. During the day, I can see the Hollywood sign from my roof, but, on fireworks-oriented occasions, my roof is one of the best views in town. Los Angeles is very spread . . .

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Cookie Monster is Not Blue Elmo

by Amelia G : July 3rd, 2008

Carny: We have a WINNER! Choose your prize.

Little Girl: I want the blue Elmo!

Carny: Here ya go! One blue Elmo for the young lady!

Jeff Schuetze: Blue Elmo? Did you hear that? Cookie Monster is not a blue Elmo!!!

Sean: We are totally old.

Jeff Schuetze: And he eats COOKIES!!!

Actor/comic strip guy Jeff Schuetze (pronounced “shoot-zee like a gun”) writes a web comic called JEFBOT. His strips are mostly about pop culture and his trials and tribulations as a SAG actor. Although he generally brings readers a new comic twice a week, he does something unusual but clever in the world of comics and lists his acting resume on there. I always wanted to see what Dogbert’s Scott Adams’ resume looked like alongside the Dilbert comics, moreso when he still had a day job. At any rate, Jeff Schuetze’s acting curriculum vitae includes a special skills and abilities list. Having looked over mountains of headshot submissions myself, I can confirm that it is fairly common for someone to list unusual talents on the back of a photo or on an attached piece of paper, the sorts of oddities which might make them a better candidate for a booking. Jeff Schuetze’s list includes biking, bowling, hydroslide, ju-jitsu (brown belt), ostrich jockey, programmer, soccer, surfing, tennis, ultimate frisbee, and videogames. While including the list is common, I’d have to say that is a unique and interesting list. I googled hydroslide and I can’t figure out how it differs from regular water-skiing. I’m dying to know what exactly that is and how the artist became an ostrich jockey and what that entails.

JEFBOT is fun in general, but it probably comes as no surprise that I especially loved the cookie monster webcomic. It is actually . . .

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Free EroticBPM gallery posted as part of my interview with Scott Owens of EroticBPM 🙂

(Image Courtesy of Blue Blood)

Happy Birthday EroticBPM

by Amelia G : July 2nd, 2008

I did this interview with the wonderful Scott Owens from EroticBPM a while back for the esteemed Thomas S. Roche back when he was editing Eros Zine. Eros Zine was unfortunately not able to post it permanently before they lamentably stopped updating. As yesterday was EroticBPM’s nine year anniversary, I felt like now would be a good time to post it here.

Scott Owens is the founder of and mastermind behind EroticBPM. BPM stands for Beats Per Minute and is an electronica term for how fast the musical percussion is thumping to get your booty shaking. The site initially grew out of the rave culture which Scott was active in. Hence the moniker “Erotic Beats Per Minute.”

Partiers who have had a blast at raves will enjoy the site, but it also appeals to a more general taste in unique young women — and occasionally men. Those who like partying teens will find EroticBPM has a lot of hot stuff to fit that taste as well. And there is a special forum for photos of models and members showing off their elbows. MistyB, one of the star models on EroticBPM, posts, “Elbow fetish is the only fetish.” She might be joking. Then again, the site features a plethora of fine examples of elbow photography.

Scott Owens is creative and always pushing the envelope in terms of how erotic content can be presented online. Although blogging is less of a focus now, EroticBPM was one of the very first multigirl erotic membership sites to feature model journals and structured profiles and the very first in his niche. The site features a thriving community where members and models and Scott and company interact in a friendly and positive . . .

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Marquis 44 Hitting Newsstands Now

by Amelia G : July 1st, 2008

The new issue of Marquis is hitting European newsstands now. This makes twenty-six or twenty-seven issues in a row of Marquis, the highest circulation glossy fetish magazine in the world, which have featured work by yours truly and Forrest Black. As you probably know, Forrest Black and I do the Big in America column. I write it and he and I shoot it.

For this issue, we featured Serena Toxicat, Nixon Sixx, Vampirabat, Eirik Aswang, and Antiseptic Fashion, and there are mentions of tons of cool pervy events and people including photographers, directors, painters, and designers. I first met author and pro-domme Serena Toxicat more than a decade ago when she slept in my living room, having come through my town as a new member of the gothic gypsy carnival which is the band Apocalypse Theatre. She has a book out now called Evangeline and the Drama Wheel, based largely on her travels and adventures with Apocalypse Theatre and partly on her personal passions and interests in sex magick. We’ve known the dangerously adventurous and itinerant Nixon Sixx since 2002 when she was living in New Orleans and Forrest Black and I were guest speakers at the ill-fated GothCon held there. We’ve had a lot of fun shooting in NOLA whatever events we came through for. Beautiful city which attracts beautiful people, but . . .

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Soon I Will Be Invincible

by Amelia G : June 30th, 2008

Soon I Will Be Invincible is out this month in paperback from Random House’s Pantheon. The hardcover was my favorite fiction read of last year. Which is saying something because I go through an average of a couple hundred books a year. From some of the promo when the book was first released, I sort of assumed it was going to be a geek chic thing. If there was ever something I was into that I had thought nobody would pretend to like just to be cool, it was being into fandom and having a big brain. Which just goes to show that, no matter how smart you are, sometimes you’ll get it wrong. When I finally got around to picking up Soon I Will Be Invincible, I couldn’t put it down.

The story is an exploration of the issues of alienation and self-confidence which face someone who is exceptional. A person can be different from the other children without being technically lesser, yet there is still enormous alienation which comes with being different. In a very real way, a top scientist or a top athlete or a top musician is truly alien, in the dictionary sense that he or she is estranged and unlike those who should be his or her own. I have often observed among my friends and acquaintances, in real life, that those who are just a bit above average often seem to function best in society. A person with a 120 IQ succeeds in a general way more often than a person with a 180 IQ. Human beings are social animals and that is just the way the system works. Which is not to say that someone who is exceptional . . .

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Juno Causes Teen Pregnancy

by Amelia G : June 29th, 2008

Ivan Reitman directed Ghostbusters and Stripes and produced Heavy Metal, so I’d like to believe that his progeny would be on the side of all that is awesome. His son Jason Reitman adapted Christopher Buckley’s Thank You for Smoking for the screen. I thought he did a great job and I loved the book and love Christopher Buckley’s writing. Doing an adaptation of a good book that readers enjoy is no mean feat. So I’m sure Jason Reitman’s movie Juno is well done. But I haven’t seen it for a few reasons.

I first became aware of Diablo Cody, who is credited with having written Juno, when a bunch of my writer friends started complaining about how they believe Diablo Cody, at best, co-wrote the film and, at worst, allowed her youngish sexually-adventurous hip chick chic to be utilized as a pseudo-feminist face for one of the Reitmans. I’d never heard of her before, so I was surprised by how many people I knew, from really different areas, who all believed this. I always remember Diablo Cody as Cody Diablo because Diablo just sounds like a last name to me and Cody sounds like a first one to me. I guess she kept some kind of a blog about stripping in between office jobs and some of the writers I know base their opinion on the level of maturity in her writing there. I haven’t read the blog and don’t really know. Whoever wrote Juno, it looks like it has some snappy well-delivered dialog, judging only from the trailers. I’m not a fan of the female mascot PR methodology, but I’ll give Diablo Cody the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she did write the film.

Here is where we come to . . .

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Verne Troyer Sex Tape Lawsuit

by Amelia G : June 28th, 2008

The biggest problem with the astroturfing style of marketing is that it makes everyone very skeptical of everything; it makes it very difficult to believe in anything. If a star willingly gets naked on camera, there will be some puritanical types who will think ill of them for it. Yet most people who enjoy being in the spotlight and being immortalized have a hankering to be in the spotlight and be immortalized even when they are, ya know, doing it. I have frequently run into famous people who want me and Forrest Black to shoot artistic nudes of them, but who do not want anyone to see the finished work. As an artist, it is important to me that people actually see what I create, so we have, to date, declined private commissions of this sort. A combination of following the various sex tape scandals, and my own personal conversations with people who wanted to get naked on camera without the social repercussions, has lead me to assume that most sex tapes are released with the knowledge and consent of the parties involved. That way, they can get the erotic attention and the victim sympathy.

The problem with this is that some people actually want their private lives to be, ya know, private. I have come to believe that actor Verne Troyer genuinely feels his privacy is being invaded with the current sex tape clip making the rounds and, at the request of his manager, I am having the honestly barely PG-rated clip removed from BlueBlood.net.

Late this evening, I received an email from someone named Ray Hughes who said that Verne Troyer was his client and who attached a PDF of what appear to be court documents pertaining to . . .

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Verne Troyer Mini-Me Sex Tape

by Amelia G : June 26th, 2008

Today, Blue Blood’s design czar Forrest Black and I rolled over to band manager Jason Fiber’s lovely Hollywood Hills home to do some press on the always-charming and fun Andy LaPlegua. Andy is touring in supporting of the forthcoming Frost EP from Combichrist. So, uhm, naturally, we drank beer and Jason brought up that there was a new sex tape potentially coming out starring Verne Troyer.

I confessed that I already knew this as I’d started my day reading the adult industry trades mags, who were all abuzz with the info that SugarDVD had started the bidding on the Mini-Me sex tape. SugarDVD CEO Jax stated publicly that he would only be into distributing the celebrity sex tape, if it were possible to get proper performer releases from both the actor Verne Troyer and his naked co-star.

I gave my opinion that a Verne Troyer sex tape would be very marketable, but the one I really want to see is where the drug dealer club kid (or whatever he was) allegedly tied up Joe Francis of Girls Gone Wild fame and made him confess his love of receiving anal on video, and then left him in the trunk of a car. Upon reflection, I don’t really want to see a naked Joe Francis being abused, but the karmic justice of it appeals to me.

In the unlikely event that you do not know who Verne Troyer is, he is best known for his role as Mini-Me, the bad guy’s smaller doppelganger protege from Mike Myers’ Austin Powers. He has also appeared in everything from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to rap videos and Apple commercials. Really Apple commercials tend to be sorta like viral sex vids . . .

( Read and see more Verne Troyer Mini-Me Sex Tape )

GNR Chinese Democracy Faith and Astroturf

by Amelia G : June 25th, 2008

I first came across Guns n’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction when I was a teenage metal DJ on the radio in Connecticut.

A little background explanation: I got into doing this gig partly because I’d gone to high school overseas and the American overseas high schools I attended were woefully behind the times when it came to music. Like really behind. I used AC/DC and Rush lyrics in my campaign posters when I ran for class president. (I won. I mean, of course I did; there were AC/DC and Rush lyrics in my campaign posters.) I was shocked when I found out that Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”, the big slow dance number where I went to ninth grade, came out more than a decade earlier than I would have guessed on a multiple choice test. So I arrived at college with more of an Aerosmith taste in music than the average student at a competitive, left-wing, East Coast school normally would have. Although I loved bands like Janes Addiction and The Dead Milkmen and The Cure and The Violent Femmes as soon as I was exposed to them, I held onto the hard rock thing because you never forget your first musical loves. Oddly, although my classmates identified as free-thinking liberal individuals, they seemed to hold the view that bands like Motley Crue and Dokken were for lower class stupid people. My annoyance at this classist hypocritical bigotry is probably the reason I became a metal DJ. I was frustrated that my classmates could be so close-minded about something like music. I enjoyed hard rock in my personal musical mix and I wasn’t about to fake like I didn’t just to impress people I went to school with. . . .

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Astroturfing

by Amelia G : June 25th, 2008

Astroturfing is the word of the week. My brother just told me that one of his model/starfucker friends just called him up to chortle over the word astroturfing. This tells me that it is officially part of the internet lexicon and everybody needs to know the expression.

The term is, like the term spam, derived from an actual product. AstroTurf is the leading brand of fake grass ground covering. Developed in 1964, AstroTurf has been a particular boon for major sports arenas in areas where real grass is not easily grown or cared for. AstroTurf takes their products very seriously and promises to provide whatever is needed for every possible sport:

” The broad range of AstroTurf products ensures that there will be a synthetic turf system engineered to meet the demands of your team’s sport. Whether it’s a field hockey team that prefers the hydrophilic properties of AstroTurf 12™, or a soccer team that prefers the high-density fiber of AstroTurf PureGrass®.

Whatever sport your team plays, there’s an AstroTurf product ready to take the field.”

Grass roots support used to be what you called it when a band or political candidate had a lot of people who believed in them, whether or not the record labels or political machine did. Astroturfing is the act of faking grass roots support.

For example, if you see a point being made over and over again on MySpace or LiveJournal or in forums, and the point is usually made by people who nobody knows in real life, who tell you nothing plausible about themselves, and who do not have known online nicks, then you are probably looking at astroturfing. This means that, when you see certain points made over and over again, by potential sock puppets . . .

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Cuddly Rigor Mortis Voodoo for Good Luck

by Amelia G : June 24th, 2008

I interviewed Kristin Tercek back in 2006 when she was first starting her Cuddly Rigor Mortis line. Since then, she has had a number of her designs mass-produced and distributed. She currently has a series of one-of-a-kind voodoo plushes available and going fast. We’ve got a gallery of her amazingly spooky-adorable voodoo dolls and I caught up with her for a quick chat about talismans for animistic deities.

Amelia G: What was the inspiration for your voodoo doll series?

Kristin Tercek: An awesome collector of our plushes wanted a voodoo doll (in our style) for his wife for Valentine’s Day. After a bit of sketching, Ed [Mironiuk] and I (well it was all Ed, really) came up with a basic pattern — mismatched button eyes, feathers on head and stitching. Then I spent a couple of days putting together different combos of colors and fabrics until one just hit. I liked having some freedom to not have to worry about whether or not I could source enough fabric or buttons for a lot of one specific character, but simply go and buy what I liked. Besides, who can resist a rainbow of feather colors to choose from?

Amelia G: Who are your voodoo dolls most suitable for torturing or do you not recommend sticking pins in them?

Kristin Tercek: I did some research on voodoo dolls and found that the ‘real’ ones are not for torturing or seeking revenge on anyone. They are really good luck charms and there should be 7 different colored pins representing different things like spirituality, health, repelling negative engery, etc. I put actual 3″ needles with different buttons on top into each plush so you can ’stick them’. But it makes it a bit . . .

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Gingerdead Free Candy and Paper Frogs

by Amelia G : June 23rd, 2008

The talented Calan Ree, whose Gingerdead & Friends comic strip I have mentioned here before, wrote about gathering paper frogs this week. According to Calan Ree, paper frogs are these partially translucent, pale, flat, dehydrated amphibians. The frogs apparently get flat from the absence of moisture and not being run over, so recent rains may have washed away the paper frogs which could normally be found in Calan Ree’s neck of the woods this year.

According to Calan Ree, paper frogs are seasonal and normally could be found this time of year. Her searches for them, perhaps due to the weather, proved fruitless. While hunting, she was, however, approached by, not one, but two creepy guys. The first one rolled up on her in a van and asked her if she wanted a ride. The second guy asked for directions to the nearest schoolyard, despite …

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